


The Soft Darkness

by sinuous_curve



Category: Captain America (2011)
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, M/M, bites/bruises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-29
Updated: 2011-08-29
Packaged: 2017-10-23 05:04:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/246546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinuous_curve/pseuds/sinuous_curve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He’s not going to tell Steve that of everything that got lost between docking in England and where they were, he never lost the packet of letters Steve wrote. He understands, now, the oddity to them that he could never place. The reason it seemed like Steve was talking around his life rather than about it is because he was. Bucky wants to ask about the chunks he neglected to mention, but won’t. Can’t. Has no reason, to, because there are things Bucky omitted in his letters back. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Soft Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed like whoa! Am I capable of writing fic in which these two are not partially saturated misery? Only time will tell.

Steve comes to him in the dark, with the sound of rain pattering on the canvas of his tent.

They’re all being extracted from the field because they should be dead and apparently that means something to the unseen higher ups who hand down their orders and sign the letters offering condolences for dead sons. Bucky has seen a lot of men die since he got to Europe and it doesn’t make sense to him that surviving merits an apology when dying is a sacrifice. But he’s tired of the rain and the mud and the smell of rot and blood and he’s not noble enough to really feel that bad about it.

“Can I come in?” Steve asks. His voice is soft and uncertain and Bucky is so, so tired.

He expects to blink and wake up strapped to a table with colorless eyes peering curiously at him from behind round little glasses. The docs in the makeshift infirmary gave him a cursory once over, just make sure he wasn’t going to die on them. Bucky supposes he’s probably hurt, but he’s not dying and what the hell’s an exhausted army medic going to do about the fact that he can’t sleep?

“Yeah,” Bucky mumbles. “Sure. If you want.”

Steve is unrealistic. His height and breadth and bulk are the stuff of movies and comic books. Real people don’t change like this, because it isn’t possible. And maybe it’s because Bucky doesn’t want to think about what happened in Hydra, but he can’t make himself believe that Steve is real. They walked out of hell next each other and they’re not dead and people look at them, Bucky sees the way people are looking at them now, and he wants to shout at them. Because it can’t be real.

He’s propped up on his cot, boots lined up neatly beside the end of his bed. Someone managed to scavenge up a uniform to replace the one he mostly lost. It’s wrinkled and kind of dirty and a little too big, but it keeps out a little of the cold. And it’s mostly dry. But it smells like someone else who is probably dead and Bucky doesn’t know what to do about that.

“I went looking for you in the infirmary tent,” Steve says, closing the canvas flap behind him with the same care he would close a door. “But they said you weren’t hurt.”

Bucky shrugs. “They would know.”

“I guess I don’t really believe them,” Steve admits.

The raw ground gives a little beneath his feet. It’s so saturated with moisture that it’s turning to mud even beneath the tent. Steve sits on the edge of Bucky’s cot. He’s still wearing his tights and leather jacket. The star emblazoned across his chest has turned a sickly gray. There’s a smear of dirt on his chin. He doesn’t feel real.

“I’m not going to croak in the night, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Bucky tells him.

He’s not going to tell Steve that of everything that got lost between docking in England and where they were, he never lost the packet of letters Steve wrote. He understands, now, the oddity to them that he could never place. The reason it seemed like Steve was talking around his life rather than about it is because he was. Bucky wants to ask about the chunks he neglected to mention, but won’t. Can’t. Has no reason, to, because there are things Bucky omitted in his letters back.

Bucky kept writing to Steve after he stopped writing to the girls. Once or twice, he turned a letter from Steve into a letter from a girl named Sarah, so he could talk in hushed, muted happiness about the news from home with his unit friends.

“I just wanted to make sure,” Steve says, ducking his head.

It is all so goddamn backwards Bucky almost laughs.

There’s a method and a rhythm to their friendship. Bucky can remember hot summer afternoons crammed into the tiny, tiny bathroom in Steve’s apartment, taping up scrapes and bandaging off bright red smears of blood from Steve’s pale skin. It had a translucent quality stretched over his narrow ribs; it turned the most vivid blues and greens and yellows when it bruised.

Bucky can make a cold compress in his sleep to slap over a black eye and he knows how long Steve’s nose can bleed before he starts to worry. He even once put three crooked stitches in Steve’s arm because there was no money for a doctor and the cut wouldn’t stop bleeding, no matter how many faded towels Bucky pressed to it.

Steve has always seemed to be made of glass and tissue paper on the outside. Now he could hold Bucky down and his stomach turns up in knots.

“Do you want to see?” Bucky asks.

Steve’s inhale is sharp and sudden and audible. Maybe a little frightened.

Bucky unbuttons his new jacket and shrugs it off. It bunches up around his waist, but he doesn’t care because if he lets it fall it’ll just get wet and muddy. He still has his undershirt, though it’s worn through in half a dozen places with rips and holes. He pulls it up his chest and off and drops it on top of his battered footlocker. Goosebumps rise up on his exposed skin in a wave.

“Voila,” he says.

“Jesus goddamn Christ,” Steve breathes.

There are rubbed raw bands at his elbows and wrists and stretched across his chest and stomach. Steve grazes the tips of his fingers against the exposed, new skin over Bucky’s breastbone. “What’s this from?” he asks.

“Straps,” Bucky answers flatly. “Leather straps to hold me down. You broke them, actually. When you found me.”

Something harsh and triumphant bleeds into Steve’s eyes. It breaks Bucky’s heart a little, because Steve is supposed to be the good one. The noble one, the gentle one, the kind one, the one that was going to get out of this goddamn mess in one piece. Even if he didn’t understand how lucky he was. Bucky never wanted Steve to become a soldier, especially now that he has seen what soldiers are capable of.

It is only a little surprising when Steve bows his head and kisses the flayed skin on Bucky’s chest. Only a little.

His mouth is dry and warm, chaste, too. This isn’t Brooklyn and there are things they can’t get away with.

“I don’t need you to do this,” Bucky says.

Steve looks up at him through the long sweep of his eyelashes. “I know,” he says.

There are small burned marks on Bucky’s collarbone and down his torso in neat, almost fastidiously precise lines. The centers are bright red and blue bruises radiate outward from them. Steve circles his thumb around one and a muted, aching wave pulses through Bucky’s muscles. He frowns to the darkness and catches Steve’s wrist in his hand.

“These?” Steve asks.

“I don’t know,” Bucky says. “After awhile I stopped looking. They burned.”

Steve kisses each and every one, and Bucky lets him.

He doesn’t need the contrition and he certainly wouldn’t listen to an apology if Steve offered. He would be asking forgiveness for being who he is, or who he was. He would be apologizing for being small and asthmatic, for not being just another goddamn grunt in the mud, slogging through Europe next to Bucky. As though he would have made a difference in that battle. As though he wouldn’t have been killed long before he got this far.

And the rest of Bucky’s skin feels like it’s made of bruises.

There’s a big one that sweeps down his ribs from his right arm across to his left hip. There are purple ones smattering his sides, right about where his tender kidneys sit, shuddering painfully through their tasks and leaving him pissing blood still.

There’s a couple of bootprints kicked into his hips and pelvis. They’re almost black and they hurt. They hurt when he got them and they hurt when he stretched, exposed, on the table, and they hurt now. He wonders if he was flayed down to bone if there’d be the same marks down that deep.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says.

“I’m not dead,” Bucky says. “What are you apologizing for?”

“That you’re hurt.”

Steve’s hands roam over Bucky’s body, pressed and soothing and touching. He used the do the same thing at night when Bucky had bad dreams that nearly tossed them both out of Steve’s narrow, creaking bed. Steve would press his hand to the nape of Bucky’s neck and murmur soothing nonsense until Bucky woke up and got his locked up longs to remember how to breathe. _You’re okay_ , he’d says, _you’re just fine_.

Bucky picks up Steve’s hand and kisses his knuckles. “Everybody’s hurt,” he says. “I’m not _dead_ , Steve. You did good.”

Steve opens his mouth to say something, but Bucky can’t hear it. He’s not a hero. So he leans forward and kisses Steve, swallows the words. “We’re okay,” Bucky says to the darkness. “We’re fine.”


End file.
